Friday, October 14, 2005

Senator Craig and the dinosaurs - and an essay

Our beloved Senator Craig has now been denounced for his "arrogant and ignorant" comments about Louisiana and New Orleans. He has reportedly said that fraud in Louisiana is as bad as in Iraq. Not content with that he also suggested that the 9th ward in New Orleans should be converted back into the wetlands it originally was. Still not content he charges that Louisiana and New Orleans represent the most corrupt governments in the country. He is apparently unaware that he, himself, as a member of the current Bush/Cheney administration, belongs to what is surely the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States. If fraud is as bad in Louisiana and New Orleans as it is in Iraq who might we thank for that. The Bush/Cheney administration beyond any reasonable doubt. They have fed no-bid contracts and cost-plus to their cronies to the point where it would be a national scandal if the MSM would even bother to report it.

This reminds me of an essay on dinosaurs I wrote some time ago. As we are still waiting for something (hopefully "big") to happen here it is.

At this very moment I have a banty hen setting. She has been setting for many days, trying to hatch two golf balls (do I have a moral obligation to stop her, I wonder). Having mistakenly told a neighbor I wanted a rooster and five hens I now have, two months later, approximately forty-eight banties of various sizes, configurations, and dispositions. If not completely wild they are at least half wild. It is impossible to keep them in the chicken yard (without an inordinate amount of work and expense to completely enclose it). They wander everywhere, waking the neighbors too early in the morning, tearing up the yards, devouring everything (bless them) except the vegetables (although they are hard on lettuce and melons). They squabble amongst themselves endlessly to say nothing of attracting coyotes. And they are incredibly stupid. Every morning at eight o'clock I emerge from my house, go to the chicken coop and spread chicken scratch for them. I also make sure they have fresh water. Having done this routinely for weeks the chickens still do not understand there is a relationship between my appearance and the chicken feed and water. They are never there and even if they are nearby and can easily see me they still don't make the association. I find this hard to believe but true. I suspect the bugs and worms they eat are far more intelligent. But this is not really about the banties. It is, rather, about dinosaurs.
It is well known of course that dinosaurs existed millions of years ago and then for whatever mysterious reason disappeared. There are many theories, or, I should say more accurately, hypotheses, as to why they disappeared. Some speculate that a giant meteor hit the earth, blocking out the sun for long enough to kill the dinosaurs. Others believe dramatic climactic changes occurred either freezing or burning them to extinction, depending upon which view you prefer. And of course there are some who just don't believe dinosaurs existed in the first place, especially those who believe the earth was created only in the year 4004 B.C. (at some very specific time in the morning). I guess it is possible that still others believe they just didn't make it onto the ark.
In any case, recent scientific breakthroughs have made it possible to lay this question to rest once and for all. It has now been concluded by those "in the know" (so to speak) that dinosaurs still exist. That, indeed, birds, including chickens, are the only remaining dinosaurs. Now, if this is true, and if it is also true that evolution, survival, if you will, is correlated however crudely with intelligence or adaptability or some such "higher" capacity, and if chickens are in fact the only dinosaurs that survived over all this time, the disappearance of the other dinosaurs is easily explained. They were just plain and simply too stupid to make it.
Chickens will at least sit on their eggs until they hatch (in the absence, that is, of jerks like me who dupe them with golf balls). No one ever found a chicken nest full of rocks no matter how round and smooth they might appear. Dinosaur eggs indeed! How do we know they didn't try to hatch river stones, sitting on them endlessly until they wore them smooth? How do we know that those furtive clever little mammals the scientists believe existed contemporaneously with the dinosaurs didn't sneak around substituting rocks for their eggs in some deliberate scheme to win out in the brutal race for survival? How indeed?
I submit that Senator Craig is himself a dinosaur and not much above the chickens when it comes to intellect. He wrote to me on June 22, 2005:
"...Although we have not yet discovered weapons of mass destruction, I have no doubt that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapons program..."
This was after even Bush himself had acknowledged there were no weapons of mass destruction. Given the fact that Craig, as far as I know, has never once voted against the Republican line, and given the fact that he seems to be totally out of touch with reality, I suggest that when his time comes, like the dinosaurs, he should simply disappear (unless, perhaps, he wants to continue to stay around as a bird-brain). Actually, the state of Idaho would be better off with a robot.

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